It was Greg McNamee, right here at Britannica Blog, who first called my attention to the imminence of the millionth word in the English language. I had no idea that such a milestone would occur in my brief lifespan, and I was – as I am sure you were – made proud.

Greg’s posting was duly followed by another marking the actual event, sort of. The millionth word turned out to be not a word but, as Language Log put it, “a phrase containing a noun…and a one of those stylish postpositive decimal numeric quantifiers.” I won’t cite the thing here, out of sheer cussedness.

This “millionth word” business is the creation of something called the Global Language Monitor, an organization that, judging by its website, exists chiefly to attract media attention. The interested reader can easily discover why this particular claim to our attention is pure buncombe, beginning with the fact (conceded on the website’s FAQ) that there is no simple and generally accepted definition of what a “word” is, and the further fact that there is no simple and generally accepted criterion for when a word is an “English” one.

As an example of the kind of scholarship that passes muster at the Global Language Monitor, the FAQ also explains that the count of words in the English language was begun by compiling “every word found in the historical codex of the language beginning with Beowulf, Chaucer, the Venerable Bede, on to the works of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the like.” Where to begin?

A “codex” is a bound manuscript. There is no “the codex” of the language.

“Beowulf” is written in Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English. Here are the first few lines:

Counting this as English is like counting the number of countries in the world and including Mercia, Wessex, Scythia, Lydia, Macedon, Cisalpine Gaul, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and so on.

The Venerable Bede wrote in Latin.

Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which looks a little more familiar to the Modern English reader than Anglo-Saxon but is still pretty strange:

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour

And then, given the list of sources that precedes it, what can “and the like” possibly mean? The FAQ provides further reasons not to take these people seriously, the search for which is left to the reader as an exercise.

However many words there may be in English, and whatever that clause may mean, surely we can agree that there are too many. Writers, especially, often like to cite their favorite words, and there are websites devoted to that hobby. But what about those words that we just don’t need? The ones that ought to be expelled from the dictionary? Driven from the door and told “Never darken my prose again!”?

Yes, I’m talking about “Web 2.0” to begin with. But then “limn.” It originally meant “to draw or paint on a surface,” but it has come to mean “to describe or outline in sharp detail.” At least, it means that when used by careful writers. But careful writers don’t use the word at all anymore, for it has been hijacked by careless ones who use it instead of “tell about” because they think it sounds, you know, classy. Bob’s Hint #1 to would-be users of English: Never, ever, use the word “limn,” either in writing, where it looks precious, or in speech, where it sounds like “limb.”

Let’s see.

“Decimate.” Beloved of sloppy journalists, this is one of the many fine words that have been rendered useless through ignorant use. It once meant “to kill or destroy one-tenth” (deci- ; get it?), but now it is just another synonym for “annihilate, raze, ruin, demolish, exterminate, massacre, wipe out, etc.” As you can see, we didn’t really need another synonym.

“Reality.” It used to be a noun, and it meant “that which actually exists,” but it has been corrupted by television programmers and publicists into an adjective meaning “completely artificial and then heavily edited,” and thus rendered unusable in decent human discourse. Alternatives for the noun sense include “the world” or, if you wish to suggest that you’ve read Wittgenstein, “that which is the case.”

And “-orama.” Not a word, but a suffix, and all the more insidious for that, as it can be stuck onto the rear end of any defenseless noun. It’s derived from the Greek word for “to see,” but it has long since metastasized into something that is supposed to connote “big deal.”